Ron Capps Okay After Violent Crash at NHRA Arizona Nationals

Yahoo

23-03-2025

NHRA Funny Car team owner/driver Ron Capps credited safety advancements that were inspired by previous profound accidents to the John Force Racing team.
Horrifying-looking wreck slices car's body in two, sends parts, pieces flying.
Hurtling at speed topping 230 mph, Capps said he braced for the side impact with the wall.
Public-address announcer Jason Galvin described it in four words: 'Big. Violent. Expensive. Painful.'
For Ron Capps, his massive Funny Car accident in Sunday's opening round of the Arizona Nationals eliminations at Firebird Motorsports Park in Chandler, Ariz., was all of those things.
The engine explosion happened, eerily, on the 18th anniversary of John Force Racing Funny Car driver Eric Medlen's death at Gainesville, Fla., that led to safety advancements that Capps said he believes helped save him nearly two decades later and a continent away at Chandler, Ariz.
It also came nine months to the day after John Force's ferocious wall-banger at Virginia Motorsports Park, near Richmond, that has the 16-time champion and 157-time winner still on the shelf with after-effects of a traumatic brain injury. Just past the 660-foot mark on the 1,000-foot course, the engine of Capps' NAPA Auto Parts entry blew up, turning his carbon-fiber Toyota Supra body to confetti spewed in all directions—and his chassis, as Capps put it, into a convertible.
The force sliced the body in two behind the supercharger. Leaning to its right side, the car spun around and headed into the other lane, where it side-slapped the wall at perilous spot, near the gate. All of this unfolded in the fraction of an eyeblink after he clocked a 230.61-mph speed on that run that lasted only 4.165 seconds.
Capps said that as his engine detonated with terrifying power in his first-round match against Blake Alexander,
'I don't know if I just didn't catch it at the time, just didn't expect to smoke and then didn't see Blake. But then it's just blurry. It bangs so quick, so violent, and then it was a convertible again. But I had fire in my face when it did it. It just started going left and I'm just, I'm living Force's accident, right? I know it's coming. I had no control. Moving pretty fast, and I know it's going to be bad. And sometimes when it's coming, it's going to be bad—and other times you feel like you're in control.
'But I just kept picturing John's accident that was right in front of us in Richmond,' Capps said. 'So I just hung on and just tried to brace myself. And when it hit, I honestly didn't expect to be awake afterwards. It was going that fast. And then I was still awake.'
Capps praised everyone responsible for safety equipment, much of it improved since Medlen's testing crash that claimed his life several days later in 2007, along with a pair of devastating wrecks for Force (one at Dallas six months after Medlen's incident, the other last June's dealbreaker at Richmond).
'So I mean, paddings, all the stuff that Eric Medlen's and Force's accidents and all those things over the years have thankfully been fixed and upgraded so that I could be OK right now. I feel fine,' Capps said. 'No issues at all. You want to thank chassis builders and Toyota and the bodies and all the work that we do.
'Man, I am sure I'm not going to want to watch it,' he said. 'It was just 'Hang on' and 'This is going to be bad.''
He said one of his first thoughts was 'to get out as quick as I can and wave the camera' to signal to parents John and Betty Capps, who were following the action from home at San Luis Obispo, Calif., and wife Shelley and children Taylor and Caden on hand that he was uninjured.
Immediately after the accident, Capps said he didn't know the cause of it. But he knew two things: 'I'm bummed we lost. And I'm really bummed [about the expense to repair it].' He even joked, 'Anybody want to throw some money as a partner? Want to come in? That's the second new car. And I feel so bad for Guido and the guys [crew chief Dean Antonelli and the team]. It's a lot of money.
"Thank God, we got NAPA Auto care and Toyota to help us, but we're a single-car team, and we're just doing our best out here. So we'll be okay. We've got a week [until Race No. 3, at Pomona, Calif.'s In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip], and I've got the best guys in the world. So the NAPA Boys will get it fixed. We can fix the car.'